Friday, September 11, 2015

Pat Buchanan: Kim Davis vs. Judicial Tyranny

And it sums up the judgment of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis about the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which said the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.

Davis refused to provide marriage licenses to gay couples lined up at
her clerk’s office and was sent to jail for five days by a federal
judge for contempt of court.

Good for her. We need more like her.

For behind her defiance are more authoritative sources than the five
justices who gave us Obergefell: the Old and New Testaments, Natural
Law, two millennia of Christian teaching and tradition, and the entire
body of U.S. federal and state law up to Y2K.

Moreover, Kentucky never enacted a law authorizing same-sex marriage. Nor did the Congress of the United States.

Whence, then, did this “law” come?

Answer: This is a creation of a Supreme Court that has usurped the
legislative power to impose a secularist anti-Christian ideology on a
nation, much of which still rejects it, but has no recourse against it.

A right to same-sex marriage was no more in the Constitution as written or amended than was a woman’s right to have an abortion.

The Court has lately been declaring to be constitutional rights that
used to regarded as shameful crimes. This is judicial tyranny. And Kim
Davis’ defiance is as old as the republic.

Recall, we were born in a rebellion against the tyrannical acts of a king and Parliament we did not elect.

President Jefferson ordered the release of all those convicted under
the Sedition Act, declared that he would no longer enforce that
Federalist-enacted law, and pronounced it a nullity.

When Chief Justice Roger Taney declared slaves were property and
could not become citizens, Harriet Tubman ignored his Dred Scott
decision, defied the fugitive slave laws, and helped slaves escape from
her native Maryland.

Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs defied the Espionage Act of
1917 and spoke out against World War I. Convicted of sedition, he was
sent to prison for 10 years under Woodrow Wilson, but freed by President
Harding.

Throughout American history, industrial workers, civil rights and
anti-war activists, and political dissenters have defied laws, ignored
court orders, and gone to jail for contempt.

Rosa Parks broke the law in Montgomery, Alabama, by refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Martin Luther King, a disciple of Gandhi, preached and practiced
civil disobedience his entire life. Now there is a statue on the mall
and a holiday for King and talk of putting Tubman or Parks on America’s
currency.

They are honored because their defiance of court orders and law-breaking were done in the cause of social progress.

But Kim Davis’ defiance of a court order was done because that is
what God told her to do, and she wanted to be faithful to the beliefs
she had embraced as an Apostolic Christian.

Yes, Virginia, there is a double standard.

In the 20th century, if you were breaking the law or violating a
court order to protest segregation, Vietnam, or apartheid in South
Africa, you got an indulgent press.

But if you were defying a court order to stop blocking integration at
the University of Alabama or Little Rock High, or stop protesting too
close to the local abortion mill, you got lectures on the “rule of law.”

Some conservatives say that Kim Davis as a public official has to
carry out court orders, even those she believes to be immoral, or quit.

Yet the course she took has undeniably advanced her cause in our unending culture war.

For she rallied and inspired many with her witness, defiance and
willingness to go to jail. She set an example of nonviolent resistance.
She treated same-sex marriage not as some great social leap forward, but
as a moral abomination. Many among the silent majority were surely
nodding in approval.

She has also exposed the breadth and depth of the division in the
country between an older Christian America and new Secular America.

Once, the Supreme Court could rely upon a residual respect for its
proceedings, grounded in a belief that ours is a good government whose
actions, even if we disagree, are rooted in principle and merit respect.

That reservoir of trust and good will is about gone.

Almost all of the civil and uncivil disobedience of the last
half-century, from campus uprisings to urban riots to political
protests, came from the left. But as an anti-Christian secularism
becomes ascendant, dominant and imperious, rumbles are coming from
right.

Indeed, from the raw politics of the Summer of Trump, it seems clear
that Middle America has come to believe it has been had, and that the
state that rules the nation is hostile to the country they love, and
needs to be resisted and defied.

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”